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China’s Ready-Made Urban Forests

Since the past few years, the
Chinese government has been planting thousands of trees in cities across
the country hoping to create an urban forest that would fight pollution
as well as bring shade to public spaces. The effort is laudable, but if
you are to investigate the origin of some of these trees, you’ll
discover a disturbing process. A large number of these trees were not
grown in their current urban location, but were relocated as mature
trees from rural areas.

“The whole concept of trying to be green
is being abused,” says Chinese photographer Yan Wang Preston, who
uncovered the disconcerting trend more than five years ago while working
on a project to photograph the entire length of the Yangtze river at
100 km intervals.

Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
In
March 2013, Preston had stopped at a tiny village called Xialiu in
Yunnan Province, where she noticed a beautiful 300-years-old ficus tree.
The village was scheduled to be demolished because a dam was being
built nearby. So Preston began photographing the village to document as
much as possible before they are gone. Three months later when Preston
returned to Xialiu she found the entire village flattened. Not only the
houses were gone but even the trees were missing. Preston learned from
the villagers who had relocated to higher ground that all the old trees
in the village had been sold for the equivalent of about £10,000. The
biggest of these trees—the 300-years-old ficus she named “Frank”—was
sold to a five-star hotel being constructed at Binchuan City, about two
hours’ drive away.
When Preston followed the trail, she found the
tree standing in an empty construction site. The hotel hadn’t even begun
construction. “It was a heartbreaking scene,” Preston recalled. “I’d
seen the tree in its home, covered with leaves as villagers lived their
lives around it. Now it was like a person with their arms, fingers and
hair all chopped off.”
The tree was crippled and to keep it alive
it was covered in needles and nutritious bags, “like drips in the
hospital”. When asked whether the tree would survive, one of the guards
replied confidently that it would. Yet, when Preston returned to the
site in 2017, she found Frank gone. The tree had died two years earlier.
“The
transplantation of trees in China is a serious industry,” Preston told
the Guardian. “Enormous numbers are uprooted and sent great distances to
new cities and redevelopments. Some developers don’t even care if the
new climate is suitable. I’ve seen trees that were taken from Vietnam
planted in places far too cold for them. They have to wrap them in giant
plastic bags.”
These images are from her recently published book Forest,
where he chronicles the life of sixty trees uprooted from their
original place of growth and transplanted into new, often
dystopic-seeming habitats.
The tree “Frank” at its new home, in 2013. Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston
Photo credit: Yan Wang Preston